The functions provided by a mobile terminal, like a mobile phone or a laptop, are based on applications implemented in the mobile terminal and on settings defined for each of the applications.
Usually, a part of these settings can be changed by a user. Some mobile terminals allow to change easily only a few settings, like voice and volume settings. Most of today's mobile terminals allow one to change a great variety of useful settings, though. In either case, each of the settings has to be changed manually by a user of the mobile terminal.
There are many different locations or situations, in which most users of a mobile terminal prefer to change the settings of their mobile terminal temporally. Changed settings may be desired e.g. in a church, in a classroom, in a meeting room or in a cinema. Often, however, users forget to change the settings as desired, or they forget later on to change the settings back.
It is thus a disadvantage of known approaches that the user always has to remember to change the settings as desired and that making use of all enabled, advantageous changes of settings is rather annoying.
For the voice settings of some applications, it is known to associate a specific profile to a specific location. Nevertheless, the user has to select the associated profile manually when coming to the location. Moreover, the settings and the corresponding locations are saved to the respective application, i.e. an extra software is needed for each application for saving the settings and the corresponding locations to the respective application. This is of particular disadvantage in case there are many applications for which the settings are to be changed for a specific location.
In Windows®, there is a file called “win.ini”, in which settings of applications of a device are saved. The settings are read from this file when Windows® is started. However, this approach relates to the PC environment and it does not take into account the current location of the device when reading the settings.